The Providence Journal: June, 2005
What an information Age this is! Suddenly, everyone, including Tom Cruise, is so informed that they've become argumentative experts on everything. There's so much information- too much information- on the Internet and television and in the press. It's beyond loud- as if our culture were a horror movie called The Spawn of Bill O'Reilly.
God forbid you end up on the wrong end of a withering conversation as Matt Lauer did with Tom Cruise on The Today Show, and find your ears pinned by "Matt, you don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."
Yes, there's a lot of information but poorer communication, and now a simple "Hello, how are you?" is just polite disguise for a then jarring and vicious "Point, Counterpoint" exchange. Conversation in America is beginning to resemble question time for the prime minister in the House of Commons on C-SPAN- now that's "reality TV." "My Right Honorable Friend is a Jerk!"
Yes, it's partly the fault of Fox News, and its cheap imitators, but the Internet has to take its share of the blame too. Consider bloggers-they take off their sheep's clothing and surprise! It's a veritable group of Nixon's plumbers!
But in light of all of this frightening conversation, a new form of verbal interaction is taking shape, right under our upturned noses. We're leaving the Information Age behind, and entering "the Inference Age!"
The art of conversation is being replaced by the art of inference.
A typical exchange contains just a few quick stabbing presumptions, along with the right body language, a few labels, and knowing asides regarding class distinctions, and presto: You've avoided an icky talk and come full-circle to an assumption. Besides, who has the time anymore for exhaustive and caustic political discussions? The marriages of America cannot survive any more of this!
So, it's the dawn of a new era, a post- election verbal truce. In the middle it's a virtual no- fly zone. We circle conversation, warily inferring this and inferring that, but never engaging in actual combat-speak, whew!
Is all this the path to enlightenment, a new form of passive-aggressive behavior or just a breather before the next election? Nowhere is infer-speak worse than in the oldest part of Europeanized America, that bastion of Democratic politics, Boston.
Nowhere else is it more tribal, and social class more fossilized. Woe to those who visit the Hub who haven't mastered the dark arts of the Inference Age: "To speak is human, to infer is divine."
However, this is a bipartisan column. How much more out as a writer can you get than that? So let me point out that our conversationally challenged commander-in-chief is solidly on the inference bandwagon as well. Why, just the other week, in his speech to buck up America for the Iraq war, he mentioned the phrase 9/11 five times in just 30 minutes.
There is nothing to fear but inference itself!
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